463538309A new, international survey of 100 CIOs has good news for cloud companies — especially Microsoft — and, predictably, bad news for hardware vendors as the trend toward cloud computing continues to swell.

According to Morgan Stanley’s 2016 CIO Survey, Microsoft’s Azure will edge out Amazon Web Services by 2019 for both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) use among 100 executives surveyed. Roughly 31 percent of the CIOs will be using Azure for IaaS, versus roughly 30 percent using AWS. Today, about 21 percent are using AWS and 12 percent are using Azure. While nearly 55 percent of the surveyed CIOs said they’re using no public-cloud IaaS today, that number will drop to less than 10 percent by the end of 2019.

Infrastructure as a Service consists of the underlying servers, storage and networks necessary for cloud computing. Platform as a Service consists of the higher-level tools and services needed to create and deploy cloud applications.

According to the survey, Azure is already leading AWS in PaaS, used by about 18 percent of the respondents, versus AWS’s 16 percent. Azure’s lead will grow slightly by 2019, growing 9.8 percent versus 6.4 percent.

The outlook for Software as a Service (SaaS) spending is strong, with 95 percent of the 100 respondents predicting it will be flat or will increase, up from 90 percent last year. Marketing applications will be the big winners, likely benefiting Adobe, HubSpot and Salesforce.

2016 Morgan Stanley CIO survey IaaS ranking
Via Morgan Stanley

Nearly one-third of all applications — 30 percent — will be migrated to the public cloud by the end 2017, up from 14 percent today, the survey said. On-premises apps will decline to 58 percent, from 71 percent today.

Predictably, hardware vendors, including conventional and flash storage makers, will continue to suffer as their market is eaten by the cloud. Hardware spending growth is down this year to 3.2 percent, from 3.4 percent last year. The biggest players — Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp — face the largest threats, the study said. But IBM may be protected by its investments in cloud computing, including the rapid uptake of its Watson cognitive-computing offering, at one year old already in use by 5 percent of surveyed CIOs and slated for use by another 15 percent.

Oracle, EMC, Dell, VMWare and Cisco, in that order, all face declines in their share of the next three years’ IT budgets, ranging from -17 percent to -9 percent.

Analytics and business intelligence, security and cloud projects were reported as the least likely to be cut, while those dealing with storage hardware, flash storage and networking were among the first that could be axed.

The survey, completed pre-Brexit by 75 CIOs based in the U.S. and by 25 in Europe, isn’t available to the public.

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